Melting-pot Modernism - 9780801448164

"Melting-Pot Modernism is an intelligent and beautifully written examination of the 'melting pot' as taken up in the work of four modernist writers. For Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein, questions of novelty and difference familiar to the immigration, assimilation, and nativist debates were likewise aesthetic concerns for problems of form, the self, and one's relation to the past and to others. Sarah Wilson's readings of individual texts are ingenious and illuminating; her argument is fruitfully grounded in solid historical understanding of the authors' lives and of contemporaneous debates on immigration."-Christopher Douglas, University of Victoria, author of A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism

"Melting-Pot Modernism persuasively links early modernist experimentation to a specific social context: the discussions and political programs addressing questions of assimilation at the turn of the twentieth century. Wilson integrates into her discussion of 'melting-pot discourse' a wide array of texts-from immigrant autobiographies and sociological studies to the New History movement-that illuminate the themes and formal innovations of literary works by Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein."-Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania

Between 1891 and 1920 more than 18 million immigrants entered the United States. While many Americans responded to this influx by proposing immigration restriction or large-scale "Americanization" campaigns, a few others, figures such as Jane Addams and John Dewey, adopted the image of the melting pot to oppose such measures. These Progressives imagined assimilation as a multidirectional process, in which both native-born and immigrants contributed their cultural gifts to a communal fund. Melting-Pot Modernism reveals the richly aesthetic nature of assimilation at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on questions of the individual's relation to culture, the protection of vulnerable populations, the sharing of cultural heritages, and the far-reaching effects of free-market thinking.

By tracing the melting-pot impulse toward merging and cross-fertilization through the writings of Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein, as well as through the autobiography, sociology, and social commentary of their era, Sarah Wilson makes a new connection between the ideological ferment of the Progressive era and the literary experimentation of modernism. Wilson puts literary analysis at the service of intellectual history, showing that literary modes of thought and expression both shaped and were shaped by debates over cultural assimilation. Exploring the depth and nuance of an earlier moment's commitment to cultural inclusiveness, Melting-Pot Modernism gives new meaning to American struggles to imaginatively encompass differenceùand to the central place of literary interpretation in understanding such struggles.